Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 for fire monitoring at a local scale: A case study on Vesuvius

In this paper a set of spectral indices, some of them novel, is suggested in order to effectively process multispec-tral images, from the NASA and ESA missions Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2, for fire monitoring. The processing aims at extract common products, useful to detect active fires and evaluate the position and extension of the burned areas. The use of open data in comparison with other paid solutions is to remark because of great interest to public and private end users. The thresholding of the proposed indices produces satisfactory results in terms of classification accuracy. Moreover, the joint use of images from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2, by increasing the overall availability of data, allows also to overcome some limitations on time delivery and high frequency observation, requirements that instead are goodly matched through the use of lower resolution multispectral images such as those from MODIS and VIIRS satellites. The proposed indices have been successfully tested on Vesuvius, that was devastated by terrible fires on the of 11th July 2017. Respect to other works of the same authors on this topic, the performance of the suggested indices are here more deeply investigated, comparing them to alternative products.